Album Review – Lacuna Coil “Dark Adrenaline” 2012

Fans turned off by 2009’s radio-rock effort The Shallow Life will find Lacuna Coil more appropriately po-faced and grim on Dark Adrenaline, which takes the spirit of brevity and focus from that previous record and adds heaviness throughout.

Opener “Trip the Darkness” provides goth with bounce, Cristina Scabbia and Andrea Ferro confidently commanding proceedings with rockstar moxie. Indeed, the whole album successfully blends the dark with the catchy. Scabbia in particular does solid work on “Intoxicated” and “Fire”, the latter a short, Jim Morrison-like mantra destined to cling to the listener’s ear long afterward. Ferro is also an authoritative presence, his accent (previously an issue for some) distinctive without being comical. The much-ballyhooed cover of REM’s “Losing My Religion” neither slavishly apes the original nor butchers it with unnecessary modification, ending up a fitting tribute to a song that really couldn’t get more goth to begin with.

Obligatory mention of Scabbia’s female-ness: Women in hard music have long fought an uphill battle to be taken seriously, often proving their own worst enemy by succumbing to the temptation to trade on image* or celebrate the female voice by stuffing releases with vocal trickery. Dark Adrenaline displays a workmanlike dedication to task that eschews this flashiness and delivers form and function together in a satisfying ride. Highly recommended. 8 out of 10

*The Shallow Life was in part a parody of this very phenomenon, at least visually. It backfired when many found the music itself to be a bit too on-the-nose.